


of snakes and cages

by bluebeholder



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Ableist Language, Canon Character of Color, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, no happy ending, yet - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 12:09:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16095374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: Her name is Nagini, and she is a snake, and snakes, they tell her, belong in cages.A character study of a character of critical importance, who already deserves better.





	of snakes and cages

**Author's Note:**

> I saw the final trailer for FB2 about two hours ago and am posting this 10 minutes before class because I'm so unbelievably furious. I'll leave it to others with a stake in the fight to go off about racism; my shouting here...is about disability. It's about the absolutely horrible cruelty of making a character whose origin is in a _freak show_ into the _literal slave_ of Voldemort himfuckingself. 
> 
> I'll give Nagini a happy ending someday soon, I promise. <3<3<3

Her name is Nagini, and she is a snake, and snakes, they tell her, belong in cages.

They tell her that she’s a freak, too.

She’s not entirely sure how much of it she believes, but what choice does she have but to believe that she is a freak, a snake who belongs in a cage?

“Where will you go if you leave?” they ask her.

Nagini doesn’t have an answer.

They say, “it’s better for you here.”

“People can only point and shout at you,” one of the others says.

“The bars keep them out,” another says.

“Listen to their cheers,” says yet another, “look at their awe. They love us.”

They do not love Nagini.

They fear her.

Her transformations are an art. She learns grace from the acrobats, learns her dangerous gaze from the lion in the cage. She is a performer, and dreams of performing on such a greater stage than this.

But there is no greater stage, not for a creature like her.

And she is a creature, this she knows. Other wizards don’t have this power. They cannot speak to snakes, as she can; they whisper “Parseltongue” and shrink in fear. Nagini takes pride in it, digs in her heels and refuses to be moved when people claim to love her.

She is also beautiful, but she’s not attached to the fact. It’s a mask of performance; the scars left by cruel words don’t show, and the scars from thrown rocks are healed with the flick of a wand. Her beauty is skin deep.

It is skin deep and she, truly, can shed her skin.

Once she keeps the long coil of scales, faintly printed with the patterns of her snake-self. She wears it wrapped around herself for a fichu, covering her neck and shoulders and chest and back. It feels more comfortable than her own human skin.

People shudder when they see it, even the other freaks. Nagini likes it, though with hard wearing the skin doesn’t last, and must be thrown away. She doesn’t repeat the experiment, for her reputation has been made.

It occurs to her that she could easily slip away or break the bars. She is powerful, she is clever, she is intelligent. She is literate, which is more than can be said for many of her poor fellows. Though she lacks a wand, Nagini has worked out some wandless magic. She can mend clothes with the touch of a finger and make faint lights around her hands. Her greatest magic is in her skin, though.

And every time she considers escape, exit, freedom, she comes back to the same old question.

“Where will you go if you leave?” she asks herself.

The wizards will not take her, not a Maledictus and a Parseltongue. She is abominable in their eyes; very well, they are abominable in hers. Their beauty, too, is skin deep, but they can mask what they truly are.

Nagini doesn’t envy that.

Her inner skin is beautiful, anyway.

Snakes are sleek and swift and beautiful. She has the chance to speak to the three heads of a Runespoor once and it leaves her starry-eyed for days, hearing the tales and secrets they whispered. The ordinary grass snakes she encounters are sly and cunning, by comparison to the lackadaisical rattlesnakes and cobras. The venomous snakes are always a little calmer than their cousins, having less need to think swiftly. Corn snakes are funny, as a general rule, having a cultural bent for laughter, and tending to be well-fed on the mice that inhabit their barns.

Snakes are neither liars nor betrayers. They are straightforward in their dealings, though they do like to keep secrets? Nagini doesn’t blame them. She keeps her own counsel, just as they do.

Humans are, when all is said and done, duplicitous and foul, and Nagini could do without them.

In the darkest moments, when a particularly inventive insult is hurled her way, she imagines what a human would look like if it shed its skin.

She imagines just what it would take to make a human shed its skin.

Nagini would never do that, though. On the brighter days she pities humans. So limited in their perceptions! When she is a snake she can smell better than any of them with the simplest flicks of her tongue, and she can sense things around her even in the dark, feeling the tiniest changes in heat. No human can match her in that.

So she performs. She stands before the crowds and changes her shape, sheds her skin and puts it back again, dances for them, charms their cobras. Nagini takes her pride where she can, and though there is little enough of it, it is fierce.

Whispers reach her ears, as presumably they reach the ears of all wizards, of a man who promises an end to things like this. To life in cages, life afraid. To a grand new order that places wizards above the world, whole and entire.

Nagini laughs at that until she cries, and cries, and cries until she is nothing but tears, eyes red and swollen, nose dripping, neck wet from the tears running down her face. She turns into a snake and coils miserably beneath her bed. She’s tired of tears, and snakes can’t cry.

It’s funny. It’s funny, and she tries to tell herself that. It doesn’t work because it isn’t funny, it can never be funny. Even if wizards were to follow this man, even if they ruled the world…

Nagini would never be free.

They will keep saying the same things that they always have. They will tell her she has nowhere to go. They will tell her that she is a freak. They will tell her that she is a snake and that snakes like her belong in cages like these.

They will keep pointing and laughing, throwing stones and cruel words. They will fear her. They will shrink from her and call her evil for speaking to snakes. They will keep her shut up forever for being something that Nagini would never have chosen to be.

No, even if this Grindelwald wins his terrible war, Nagini will never be free of her cage.

After all, it was wizards who put her there.

**Author's Note:**

> Well...yeah, I lowkey did some research.
> 
> I had no idea that pythons had heat-sensing pit organs, and let me just say that I was hyped to find out. Talk about intriguing, Nagini gets special Snake Powers right from the get-go. That's cool, at least!


End file.
